


Hound

by pprfaith



Series: Author's Favourites [18]
Category: Highlander: The Series, Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen, Horsemen, Murder, Pre-Canon, Slavery, Violence, uhm...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-23
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 12:32:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2348576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damien Moreau must die. Eliot has known that all along. </p><p>(The one where Eliot was once Death's favourite hound.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hound

**Author's Note:**

> Older story repost, but I like this one, actually.

+

A prison with no escape.

A steam vent that no _normal_ person can use.

A place called _The Tombs_.

“Damien Moreau will never leave San Lorenzo.”

End of the line.

There is blood in the walls, in the floors, soaked into the stones. The man that calls himself Eliot Spencer knows places like this one, knows that the smell never leaves. Death has a way of lingering, of sinking into things and changing them. Making them his. 

Vittori has already announced that _The Tombs_ will be sealed off. Never used again. No more blood spilled in this dark place.

Almost. 

One more person must die.

One more person’s blood in the walls. One more man falling victim to the name.

One more.

Eliot knew it would end this way. From the moment Nate said, “Damien Moreau,” he knew it would end this way.

He doesn’t want it to. He’s not that man anymore, the man he was in the desert, so long ago. He’s not the man that followed Moreau willingly for lack of anything better to do. Hitter is a nicer word for mercenary and Eliot has been that in all his incarnations. Moreau offered a lot of money and something - the glint in his eye, the way he dances with a sword in his hand - drew Eliot like few men have drawn him.

Damien isn’t that old, or that powerful. But he has words and charisma and he never flinches. In all the years Eliot has known the man, he has never once flinched.

“Maybe your hat isn’t so white after all,” he says as he kneels before Eliot in the cell that will be his tomb, a sword at the juncture of his neck. He smirks and still doesn’t flinch.

Eliot shrugs and doesn’t let his _anger frustration guilt fear regret_ show on his face. Not even in his eyes. He doesn’t want to be here and if he’s honest, he doesn’t want to kill this man. They’re not so different, Damien and him, not even now. 

Sophie says he’s not that man anymore, but she’s wrong. He tries not to be and he thinks that might make a difference, but underneath he’s still the same he always was. Mercenary. Bloodhound.

He called this man friend once.

But Nate said, “Damien Moreau,” and Eliot knew it had to end this way. 

He can’t leave Damien here, in an inescapable prison, with not even suicide as an option. _Tombs_ or no _Tombs_ , the man faces a lifetime in solitary, whatever Vittori may decide to do with him. A human lifetime. Someone will notice he doesn’t age. Someone will notice he doesn’t die. San Lorenzo is small and superstitious. Someone will notice and make either a god or a devil of the man.

There are few rules amongst immortals and Eliot has broken most of them. But not this one: _Keep the secret._

One more person must die.

Damien Moreau is that person. 

Eliot tries to think of it as mercy, but the excuse is thin, even to his own ears. He considers saying that he’s sorry, but he’s not, considers giving this man some last words, anything at all. There’s nothing left to say. He’s a mercenary, and once upon a time, Damien offered money and excitement and a friendship that could last longer than a few flimsy decades. 

But a mercenary’s loyalties change and maybe Sophie is right. In some ways at least, Eliot is not that man anymore.

He brings down the sword.

Neither of them flinches.

+

Flores waits for him at the top of the elevator, arms behind his back, posture straight. Always a soldier. 

“Commander,” he greets and Eliot doesn’t need to ask to know that the other man knows what he just did.

“General,” he returns the greeting, holding himself still. 

“You just murdered an unarmed man in his prison cell.” Flores is a soldier, but he’s a good one. One who believes in things. Eliot never believed in anything.

He shrugs. _He held too many secrets. He was a danger. It was mercy. I felt pity for him. He deserved it. I wanted to. I didn’t enjoy it._ All those things he could say.

What leaves his mouth is, “Yes.”

Flores steps aside, unblocking the entrance. “You and your team saved my country,” he says. _We are even. Don’t come back_ , is what Eliot hears.

He nods.

+

They don’t ask where he’s been and for the twenty-four hours they spend in planes and airports, they don’t know anything is wrong. As soon as they touch down in Boston, Hardison switches his phone back on and his inbox pinges with news alerts.

“Moreau is dead,” he says, looking up from reading, his eyes wide. 

“What?” Nate asks at the same time as Sophie and Parker just frowns.

“He was found dead in his cell a few hours after we left.” The hacker looks like the world just tilted, so surprised and clueless. As he does so often, Eliot wishes he could tuck him away someplace safe and keep the world far, far from him. Him and Parker. Nate and Sophie can look after themselves, but Alec and Parker are fragile in ways that make Eliot’s insides churn. 

Once upon a time, he would have preyed on them, hunted them.

He is dead silent and perfectly still, but they all turn to stare at him anyway. They know. How could they not?

He spins on his heel and walks away. Because he still is that man, in all the ways that matter, and he killed an unarmed man on the blood soaked floor of his own prison cell and didn’t flinch.

Hardison calls after him and he hears steps, but they can’t follow him, not really. Not if he doesn’t want them to. He loses them before he leaves the airport.

+

“Why did you do it?” Parker asks as she drops in his bathroom window while he showers. He finishes washing his hair, wraps himself in a towel and then walks past her into the bedroom, looking for clean clothes. 

When he makes no attempt to talk, she repeats, “Why did you kill Moreau?”

There’s no accusation in her voice, no judgment. She’s the most innocent of them in some ways, the most jaded in others. 

“Who’s listening?” he asks instead of answering and she shrugs easily as she props herself up on his dresser.

“Hardison. Sophie and Nate say we should leave you alone. I think that’s stupid and they’re busy having sex anyway. Moreau was a bad man.”

That gets a smirk. “I’m a bad man, too, darlin’.”

“Is that why you did it?” She frowns, that cute face-scrunch she does when she doesn’t understand something at all.

He could give her all the answers he couldn’t give Flores and he thinks, between her and Hardison, they might even make sense of them. Somehow. 

He shakes his head.

“Hardison wants to know if that’s one of those things I’m not supposed to ask about,” she dutifully reports and he finds himself almost laughing. 

She seems to take that as an answers because she nods, jumps to her feet and says, “Good. Are you coming to dinner? Hardison is ordering pizza.”

+

He doesn’t go for dinner, but he shows up at McRory’s two weeks later, bud in his ear, and lets Nate lay into him, lets Sophie fuss at him. Parker and Hardison seem to have come to some kind of decision, because when they decide he’s taken enough shit from their esteemed leaders, they plant themselves in the chairs on either side of his and Parker puts on her scary face.

He pretends that doesn’t make him feel all fuzzy and warm inside and tries to concentrate on the briefing.

He almost manages until something he hasn’t felt in a mortal age comes crashing down on him and, for a moment, all he hears is the roar of blood in his ears. He turns to the door before it opens, completely missing whatever is going on around him and when their eyes meet across the room, it’s like the past two thousand years haven’t happened.

It’s like they’re still as they’ve always been, swords in hand, their faces painted, blood soaking the sand. Eliot has always been a mercenary and long before Damien Moreau offered money and the antidote to boredom, another man offered him much more. 

And he accepted.

He pushes back his chair, stands, meets his old _friend enemy lover brother master_ halfway. “Adam,” the man says as they clasp hands.

“Eliot,” Eliot returns as they hug.

Then, new names exchanged, identities given, the pull apart and Eliot turns to the others, says, “I’ll be back,” and drags the old man from the bar.

+

“Adam?” he asks, once they hit street level, “Really? That’s a bit too much irony, even for you.”

“Hush, Elijah,” Methos says, slinging an arm over his shoulders. “You are a hard man to find these days.”

Eliot smirks and says nothing.

“You know why I’m here,” Methos tells him and then answers the non-question himself. “Moreau.”

Eliot lets the arm rest on his shoulders, lets the other man press into his side, familiar and heavy, but doesn’t answer. 

“You broke the rules,” the old man goes on, almost idly. But he’s always been at his most dangerous when he was feigning disinterest, so Eliot knows better than to dismiss him. Knows better than to forget that the seemingly boneless, graceless man beside him was once called Death and rode on a pale horse, his brothers by his side, and his pack of undying bloodhounds on his heels. 

Eliot was once one of those hounds. 

Now, he is the last of them. 

Methos, too, never flinches.

“Since when do you care about rules?” he asks, just as casually, just as seriously.

A laugh, bitter and loud. It stings. “Let’s just say someone’s managed to find and reinstall my elusive conscience at last.”

Eliot smirks. “Yeah? I’d like to meet them.”

A wave of one hand, dismissive. “The Highlander. You’ve heard of him? Most stubborn Boy Scout I ever met and you wouldn’t believe what a nag the man can be.”

He sounds honestly fond and amused in a way that isn’t as dangerous as it used to be. He’s offering something, something precious. A truth for a truth. Man to man, instead of master to hound, Eliot thinks. They have been many things to each other since the Horsemen rose, but they’ve never been simply men.

“Damien had to die,” he answers at last.

“So you turned on your master.”

Eliot stops in the middle of the sidewalk, turns to look at Methos and just… looks. He’s always been a mercenary. He’s always had masters. Some were good men, like Nate, some were bad men, like Moreau. Some were gods, like the man in front of him. Some he has forgotten. Master or not has nothing to do with this. Damien had to die. 

“Ah,” the old man says, darkly amused and that’s more like it, that glint that Eliot remembers fearing once, long ago. He still does. “Someone found your conscience, too, did they?”

Eliot snorts as he turns, starts to walk away. The other follows. “Unlike you, _Adam_ , I’ve always known where mine was.” He slants a sideways look at the old man. “Right where you left it after you ripped it out of me.”

 _Whatever I do,_ he doesn’t says, _Whatever sins I commit, you are to blame for, too. You made me. I am your hound._

Methos hears him anyway and shakes his head, sadly. He looks at the ground and Eliot can’t tell if the penitence is real or not. “One regret in an endless row of them, old friend. Just one.” He shakes his head again and meets Eliot’s gaze. “But you’re more than what I made you. You always have been. It’s why you’re still alive.”

 _It’s why I didn’t put you down with the rest of the pack._

Whatever regret the old man might feel is entirely separate from necessity. Eliot understands that perfectly, but he wonders if they’ve ever had a conversation where every word was spoken out loud. Out loud, instead of hidden under layers of meaning, encrypted and disguised. He doesn’t think so. Maybe that’s why he likes Parker and Hardison so much. They’re utterly incapable of nuances and subtlety. 

Gruffly, Eliot decides to cut to the chase. “Why are you here, old man?”

“Can’t I check in on an old friend?”

Silence.

Methos laughs and then abruptly goes silent. “You liked Moreau.” He raises a hand when Eliot makes to protest. “Once upon a time. You liked him. I did, too. He had a certain… charm. When I heard he was dead I needed to…”

_Make sure you were okay, see if you’d gone off the deep end, find out if you need to be put down, too._

Two thousand years, and Death is still cleaning up his messes, still cleansing the world of his sins. Eliot is tempted to tell him that some stains, like the bloodstains on the floors of _The Tombs_ , never come out, but he’s sure the other man knows. 

“But you’re fine. You’re better than fine. So I guess I’ll just…” He turns to leave, ready to simply walk away and disappear for another century, only to pop up again in Istanbul or Berlin or Sao Paulo. Maybe Moscow. They both like the cold, so different than the lands they hail from. 

Eliot lets him go. 

But the old man turns, suddenly, stops, says, “Kronos is dead. As are the others.”

It means a million things.

“Only you and me then, pal,” Eliot drawls.

He has always been a mercenary, a hound, a weapon. But there are less and less people who remember that.

Only the two of them now, who remember the whole story. 

“Only us,” Methos echoes with a nod and fades into the crowd. 

Once he’s gone, Eliot reaches up and takes out the earbud. The others have heard enough for now. 

+

Parker comes through the ceiling this time and, without looking around, walks over to the door, letting Hardison in. They take off their shoes – house rules – and pad barefoot into his bedroom, where he lies in the middle of the bed, hands folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling. 

They curl up on either side of him like they belong there and Alec says, “You didn’t have to do that, man. You didn’t have to let us listen in.”

Eliot shrugs. “It was easier,” he tells them, “than explaining.”

Parker smacks his chest lightly, like he’s being dumb. “You didn’t need to _explain_ ,” she clarifies.

“Before I was Moreau’s,” he finds himself saying anyway, “I was Adam's. And the things I did-“

Parker stops him with a finger on his lips, shushing him with a stern glare that makes him want to trace a line from her forehead to the tip of her nose. Hardison raises his hand and simply does, until she’s smiling again, sweet and easy. 

Then the hacker leans over Eliot and says, “And now you’re ours. That’s what matters, Eliot. So stop being stupid. And share the blanket, man!”

Startled, Eliot laughs and lets them untuck the sheets around him, lets them squirm in with him properly, until they’re settled like they mean to stay. 

He listens to their breathing for a long time and eventually he falls asleep with Hardison’s smell in his nose and Parker’s hair tickling his shoulder blades. 

He dreams of the desert.

+


End file.
